“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do. Doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in doing.”
- Meiser Eckhart
So often, we search for wisdom as if it lives “over there.” We think we need more, better, different.
What if true wisdom lies in how we attend to what is right in front of us?
The way we wash the dishes. The time we take for a thoughtful conversation. The chopping of vegetables without hurry. Allowing an extra minute to consciously take a deep breath before we dive into the day. Somewhere along the way, we were taught that joy comes after the work is done.
What if the joy lives in the work itself?
Work that is less about productivity and more about presence. A way of moving through the world where nothing is too mundane to deserve our full attention. The small daily gestures that, by doing them wholeheartedly, feed our inner landscape first and foremost.
The Benedictines have a phrase for this: ora et labora. Pray and work. It is both their ethos and way of daily life. There is no separation between the sacred and mundane. We don’t have to enter a monastery follow this philosophy. We simply have to approach whatever we choose to do as if it’s worth our whole attention. Devotion is in the details of our daily life.
As photographer Eve Arnold notes, “It’s the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is.”
How do we get out of acting from auto-pilot mode? How do we resist the urge to rush ahead, to get to the other side of “getting it done?”
We slow down. We attend to what is right in front of us. We bring the quality of our whole heart to whatever needs or wants to get done, no matter how mundane it might seem.
It’s easy to forget and over complicate our lives. Here is your reminder, a bit of wisdom, from the Encouragement Card Deck:
Show up. Do the work. Make it beautiful.
And remember, this also includes rest!
x Alisa
Photo credit: Eve Arnold, Sylvana Mangano at the Museum of Modern Art, 1956